Creative // Copy

Real-time football highlights - for the fans, by the fans.

Bacardi-owned whisky brand William Lawson's tasked us to 'do something epic' for the Chelsea vs. Arsenal Premier League fixture in March 2014 to make football fans consider choosing scotch over beer as their in-game drink. As football-lovers ourselves, we quickly arrived at the insight that real fans couldn't care less for glossy corporate sponsorship - but instead spend their time online during and after matches watching dodgy highlights and consuming lofi, comedic, fan-created content. We combined these two behaviours and created #NoRulesHighlights - real-time, fan-made highlights of the match.

Perhaps the most ambitious project I've been involved in, it required us to watch the game live in a studio, with a cast of 'players' standing by. Every time there was an incident in the game, the teams would spring into action, and painstakingly recreate what they'd just seen at Stamford Bridge. We got each highlight clip online within minutes of the real incident, and with the help of some carefully-selected influencers, we were able to sneak our way into the social conversation around the game. It proved to be a busy day for us - the game we picked featured six goals, a penalty, and a wrongful sending off.

Without any media spend, our 8-minute highlight reel racked up over half a million views on YouTube, with an overwhelmingly positive response from fans begging us to give another match the #NoRules treatment. We more than obliged - by covering the whole of the 2014 World Cup in just the same way:

The campaign was shortlisted in ‘Engagement’ and ‘Content Marketing’ categories of the 2015 Brand Republic Digital Awards.